Posted
by
timothy
on Friday August 10, 2012 @11:30PM
from the sounds-like dept.

crookedvulture writes "Most PCs have audio integrated right on the motherboard. There's much to be gained from upgrading to a discrete sound card, though. This look at a couple of sub-$50 sound cards from Asus explores what can be found at the budget end of the spectrum. In blind listening tests, both cards produced better sound than an integrated solution. They also offered superior signal quality, but neither had an impact on gaming performance. The days of hardware-accelerated game audio seem to be behind us, with developers handling positional audio processing in software."

The switching frequency is well above the limit for audio frequencies, and a good quality PSU will do plenty of filtering. USB to S/PDIF is good for a few reasons: 1) The signal is kept digital, and either differential, balanced or optical for as long as possible. This makes it hard to pick up noise. Digital-to-analog conversion should be done as late as possible because digital signals are very noise-tolerant. 2) Optical connections eliminate grounding issues (less of a problem if you obey #1, anyway). 3) S/PDIF equipment tends to be built to higher quality because it's considered somewhat "high-end" (or, at least, more than a cheap motherboard audio chip). 4) D-A conversion is done far away from the noisy CPU and data buses. It has nothing to do with the SMPS.

You should hear the sound from the vacuum tube guitar amplifier I built. The high tension (300V) is generated by a crappy 50kHz switching boost converter I designed and built myself. The noise on the supply is absolutely awful - 1Vp-p even with only a light load. You can't hear it, though, because it's 50kHz. And that's really low frequency for a SMPS.

with some amps, though, they are very wideband and you don't WANT high freq garbage up there. some good phones amps go flat to 100khz and higher. they want to more than more than cover the audio range and they don't 'like' protection or LP filtering.

so, that means you have to care. if you are a source box in front of their amp, you HAVE to care. just giving you some free advice.

keep the high freq stuff out of the audio chain and the guy in the next stage will thank you.

Well, yes, that is true, it can be bad to drive a big amplifier with high frequency noise. Very bad, in fact - the excess load can do anything from distorting the output to causing extra heat dissipation and killing the transistors. (My guitar amplifier was meant to drive a speaker directly, and it had a low-pass filter between the gain and output stages. The tube was just for the clipping distortion sound; the output stage was a BJT class AB push-pull with a much cleaner power supply.) I was talking more in the context of this article, though - most people who own an amplifier with flat response to 100kHz are not going to be bothering with $50 sound cards, or for that matter even considering integrated audio.

Though, a couple questions (despite some vacuum tube stuff, audio is only a minor interest for me) - 1) What exactly do you mean by "don't like LP filtering"? I can't imagine how a low-pass filter could cause a problem in this case, especially if you just attenuate about 20-30kHz and up. 2) WHY do people even bother with an amplifier that has flat response to 100kHz?? That seems a bit excessive, unless you're playing music for your pet bat... Is there an advantage I'm not aware of?

Because the HF has harmonics that are in the audible spectrum as well. Not only that, but it "dampens" the amount of dB you have left for signal/noise ratio. You can try and use a low-pass filter to filter it out, but since those are analog, they will also filter out part of the audible spectrum and not filter out all the hf noise, just dampen it.

Also remember that there is no such thing as a brick walled perfectly flat filter that doesnt have an infinite delay, either analog or digital.

If you go for the brick wall, you get ripples in the pass-band..
If you avoid the ripples, your brick wall becomes a slow roll-off.

The real solution is not to play this game. If you dont have frequencies you dont want then you dont have to filter them.... but thats hard when you've got a PSU and other electronics throwing noise out all over the spectrum.

This is semantics anyway. Most amplifiers have some form of power supply rejection. You never get the switching noise passed fully through the gain stages, and the actual switching signals are typically very small when you look at a SMPS waveform. If you have are affecting your possible SNR by more than a completely trivial amount you should redesign your amplifier or replace your powersupply.

One answer for your second question is that why add extra filter circuits that will attenuate the signal just because the drivers can handle the upper frequencies when you can make sure you get clean audio into the inputs and keep the amp as simple as possible.

MOSFETs can switch flat at those frequencies, but they aren't used because of the frequency range, but because they are way cleaner and efficient at audible frequencies under high power than ye olde transistors. You get the 100KHz flat range as a hap

Where do you get music that has frequencies above 22kHz? Is it not more likely that you would get unwanted noise than actual signal in supersonic frequencies because they cannot be deliberately mastered? Even if the high frequency signals came from the recording as intended, AND the speaker could play that high, they would just produce intermodulation distortion on the speaker degrading the quality of the actually audible spectrum.

There is individual variation of course, with claims going as far up as 25kHz

since I build and test DACs (and spdif switchers, too) I need to be able to play 'what is out there'.

let me tell you, I have a small (but still useful) collection of HD files (just audio) that are 88.2k (double redbook 44.1), lots and lots of 24/96k files (good point to master at) and then the 'strange' ones that are mostly about marketing with more res than needed: 176k and 192k. since my DACs have to support ALL bitrates, I need to have material to test with. you don

Very good point regarding the amplification stage. Audio amplification is really no different than RF amplification, just a much lower frequency. Typically, one would use a band pass filter or the like to order to keep unwanted signals out of the amplifier.Of course this doesn't help when you have harmonics of other signals which happen to be in this band. Which is why things like proper grounding and shielding are so important.

using an LP filter is a brute force method. very crude. can't sell $2k amps that do 'college 101' level things. you have to be better than that to be world class in audio.

the DIY designs (diyaudio , etc) are worth looking at. see how many of the truly world class (nelson pass helps out the gang from time to time, so do other famous guys) amps work. they don't filter themselves! they have bypasses where needed but they tend to h

I got both of them.. the sound is good, there's optical spdif and they offer dolby live(live encode to 5.1 dd).

the u3 is like 30 bucks too, very cheap.

the drivers could offer more options though(it would be nice if they had adjustable low-pass for the 5.1's subwoofer channel for example).. that's the weakest link of both of these usb dongles. but it's still better than splicing the audio from the hdmi output, which offers pretty much no options at all(nvidia).

After all, a digital circuit required an oscillator to work. That oscillator when not properly grounded will couple to other signal paths. Basically, anything which generates a frequency can couple onto another circuit. Even if the primary frequency is not interesting to the components of that circuit, the harmonics could well be.

20 Khz is detectable by most people as a buzz, no matter what is transmitted. If the buzz is clear enough and follows the rest of the band transmitting its fine, if not then about 50%+ of people will find something wrong with the music. However since its not a frequency broadcasted in all songs most people register it as a problem with the SONG or style of music and just don't listen to that type of music. This is also why a lot of people didn't/don't like the sound of the new high-strung low-cost stereos a

this card is lab grade (test gear quality) in its a/d and d/a. some people use it for RMAA audio gear testing. not kidding! this is a low noise floor that you won't normally find on internals cards, yet it IS AN INTERNAL card! blows my mind;)

also supports balanced and unbal i/o as well as 'easy' i2s and very easy coax spdif i/o.

it needs a full height slot and generally is pci-only even though some new pci-e version is supposed to be out soon.

keep it in mind: if you find yourself needing to test audio amps, preamps, dacs, etc - the ESI julia card is about as good as it gets for under $1k or even higher. amazing for audio guys. stupid for gamers but we are not talking about gaming at all.

Where do graphics cards that pump audio out fit in here? I only noticed my card (gtx460) was putting out sound when I changed my monitor to my TV, didn't connect the sound, and it made me jump out of my skin.

I've since just used the dvi-hdmi cable for everything - not bothered with the motherboard sound.

they act as a sound device with only a digital out. some cards include a cable to wire to your sound board's spdif out instead. There are no analog components for the system noise to interfere with (barring egregious digital noise that creates too much jitter).

I use optical digital cables to connect my PC to my stereo. Could the distance really even matter at that point? It's a pure digital signal. Why are the blind listening tests not done with pure digital signals?

at least on plastic toslink, there's no concept of reflections. back-energy does not happen on toslink. but it DOES happen on coax/spdif. shorter does matter here. think of it this way: you send a signal to the far end of the coax (again, not opto, but coax) and it sends most of its energy there but reflects back some. that takes some time to travel along the cable back to the start. it then bounces back again, along with new energy from the last pulse of the transmitter. this goes back and forth and blurs the 'location' or timing of the 1's and 0's.

now, if your DAC system fully and completely locally (!) reclocks, you are fine. if not and if it DEPENDS on the timing of each and every 1 and 0, it would 'dump out' the 16bit audio word at the wrong time since one of those 'clock edges' was off by a bit, due to the reflection blur. it happens but its test-equip level, not 'wow, that sounds horrible' level. very subtle but once you have $10k-class spkrs (etc) you CAN hear blurring of the timing.

long answer: but in real world, you don't care about cable length in digital audio. best to stay 6' or 10' or less. if you go farther, you MAY want to consider a bridge (like data link bridge; fully receives spdif stream then recreates it via a receiver/transmitter combo; not a repeater but a full recieve, digest, regurg, retransmit pair of rx/tx chips).

Of course, you want as much headroom current as possible, but my understanding was that most output op amps lack the current to drive most sets of speakers/phones because they were really meant to drive a line-in device like amplified computer speakers. If the impedance is low enough, the amps will clip (or create distorted waveforms even before then) because of current limitations.

I think the number one issue with modern onboard solutions is impedance mismatch between the output op amps and whatever they're driving. Many people mistakenly plug headphones into these thinking they have the current to drive them. This varies depending on the impedance of the phones, which vary greatly from model to model, but most of these onboard solutions were never designed to do this, resulting in terrible sound. In addition, many of those that have dedicated headphone outputs often suffer from the same cheap-as-possible philosophy.

This is correct. Even those basic Realtek chips are not your grandpa's noisy Sound Blaster anymore. Just get a separate headphone amplifier (it does not even have to cost much) and you'll experience the best sound improvement.

Actually their RightMark audio analysis's don't show this at all, frequency response, THD, noise, are all so close between devices that a human wouldn't be able to tell the difference between them, the ignoramuses at TechReport however don't know how to read the graphs/understand the limit of human hearing and came to erroneous conclusions.

Their section on different peoples opinion of the various audio devices does not state the result of the blind listening test and so is useless, why even bother with tests that are not blind?

I think what's most telling about their analysis is on the 96kHz plots. The Realtek consistently drops to nothing around 20kHz, and yet apparently that didn't mean anything to them other than "look how well these results fit with out hypothesis". Anyone who actually knew something about didgital audio would think "either I've set this up wrong or the drivers/hardware are bust, because this thing is blatantly stuck at 44.1kHz".

The only other thing to be gleaned from the graphs is that running at 96kHz is pointless because the supposedly better cards' performance FUCKING SUCKS past 20kHz.

Anyone who actually knew something about didgital audio would think "either I've set this up wrong or the drivers/hardware are bust, because this thing is blatantly stuck at 44.1kHz".

Or it's just got a low-pass filter with the cutoff set at 20 kHz which can't be disabled. You need one for proper signal reconstruction at the 44.1kHz sample rate, and it's not like most people are going to notice that their onboard sound can't actually output frequencies above 20 kHz in its 96kHz sampling mode.

I think claiming to have 192kHz DACs and then sticking a 20kHz filter in front of them would be...misleading. And looking at the datasheet it certainly suggests that the cutoff moves with sampling rate.

But whatever the cause, the point is that something like that should not pass without comment; that it has done indicates to me that the reviewer may not be particularly familiar with the subject.

cheap cmedia usb sound dongles (not all dongles are cmedia, in fact most are not so you have to shop carefully) and also the burr brown PCM series all do a decent job of converting 44 and 48k audio (including dvd audio downmixed to 2.0) to spdif.

everyone's avr, today, has opto in. the sound card dongles send out usb audio over opto to spdif-in of your home stereo. if its 5.1 or newer, it will accept opto just fine. (aka toslink).

nothing else to care about, pretty much. let your stereo (or DAC) do the heavy lifting. usb audio is the way to go (for future, use UAC2, usb audio class 2 which works fine with linux and some hacks on windows at 24bit and 192k, personally verified to be bit-perfect).

soundcards 'offer' freqs to the sound system. back in the dinosaur days, they would offer only 48k and the o/s would have to resample.

but xp and win7 all deal with 44/48 split just fine. linux always has.

onboard audio (if its native spdif via jacks or headers) is usually bit perfect. its there to give 5.1 and even 7.1 digital out. the days of speaking 'only 48' ended 5yrs ago or more (I forget). a long time, at any rate (lol, any rate!)

I'm willing to bet they do, but it's hidden behind a software resample, at least for the dacs behind the analog outs.. I would hope that modern drivers do not resample for the spdif unless it's not a supported frequency/bitrate. I'm talking about the PCM standard here, not the raw output used for ac3/dts.

Meh. I doubt many consumer systems have bit-perfect outputs, these days -- it seems there's always something in the loop to screw things up (including volume controls, whether implemented in software or otherwise).

If it actually is a bit-perfect output, then you can take a DTS CD*, play it on the computer over S/PDIF to any modern(ish) AVR, and very simply get 5.1 channels of analog output without additional fuckery. It's a fun test, and I think you'll be surprised at the result: Chances are good that yo

I don't know about SPDIF playback, but I do know that I've never found a way to do a bit-perfect SPDIF record on Windows 7 - something, as a few people have now said, always gets in the way. On Windows XP, on the other hand, it is possible.

Back in the day, I had a Zoltrix Nightingale card (actually, I still have it -- all $23 worth of it including the optional TOSLINK module), and was able to do verifiably-correct recording and playback over S/PDIF under Linux and Windows.

The C-Media 8738 chip on that card is simultaneously marvelous in its simplicity and signal routing and lousy for its analog audio quality. As an S/PDIF IO, though, it did just fine. (I bought it specifically to use with an external DAC.)

Many people use headphones straight on the system, or PC speakers. For that, a soundcard can be a cheap benefit. Is a receiver better? Sure, but then they are more expensive. You can always find better for more money. I'm quite partial to my 7.1 setup on my computer but I'm not going to suggest it to most people on account of the extreme cost.

So if you are a headphone type, a cheap soundcard can be a very worthwhile upgrade.

Also if S/PDIF is your thing you've no need for an external soundcard in most cases,

Every motherboard I've ever owned or bought has had S/PDIF outputs available. My previous motherboard did so via an onboard RCA, and my current one via a set of headers that I've seen on every motherboard made in the last 5+ years. Personally I just run from this header to a socket on back of the computer, via a 4m long cable to a DAC. Sound is perfect.

sometimes, though, I've seen noise riding on the spdif. and if you don't use trafos to block (pulse brand or similar) you risk having NASTY ground loops.

if you use opto, you avoid all that. but still, noise on the psu line (optos tend to be 3.3v or 5v based and they have 3 wires: gnd, power and data-in) can cause data errors on the receiver IF the receiver is not great at rejecting 'junk'. some do better than others. some pass the noise along! sometimes you get screeching nois

it would be on a cheap video card before a sound card. I never bought any sound cards after they started puting them on the mobo. Sure the sound could be better but I have a stereo for playing tunes and if i'm playing games at night I'm using headphones anyway. A better soundcard is a non-issue for most users.

Those big plexi glass windows some people have (i got a box that has one to) really suck is you have any kind of radio transmitting in the house. Has something to do with the steel case shielding your box and also preventing your box from interfering with other devices and you computer is grounded through the power supply so AC has a point.

It was my experience (Especially with nasty horrible SoundMAX integrated audio before the integrated HDA bus audio) that the audio channel would pick up AM radio frequencies produced by various components inside the chipset itself, and produce funny "Birdie" noise when the processor was doing things, and especially when the PCI bus was pushing a lot of bits. This caused serious issues when playing video games. The only solution I found was to disable integrated audio, and switch to a cheap CMedia PCI card.

Heck, any videocard that runs over $170(really anything in the previous generation and marked down now that the nvidia 6xx and ati 7xxx series are out) have a HDMI connector on them just for that. The only real complaint most people have about them? The audio can be a real pain in the ass to get working, once it's working not a problem.

Yup. Discovered that by accident when I got a new TV and hooked it up to my machine through DVI -> HDMI. Suddenly Windows was telling me I had a new output device. Checked the device list and lo and behold there was a TV icon and all my Windows sounds were coming through it.

Seriously? A good soundcard will last you across multiple generations of hardware. Heck my old Soundblaster Live lasted from 2002 right up until 2011 when the ports on the back finally failed, and I simply gave up on trying to solder in new ones. You know for 8 years for a PCI card that cost me $80, that's a pretty good investment. With the new PCIe jobs? Same deal. Though I have an Asus Xonar DG(picked it up on sale for $29 last year from newegg), I should easily get 5-6 years from it.

I still have my Soundblaster Live its in a box with my Diamond Monster II just because they were so cool and in case my onboard sound craps out but i don't want to use it in case I break it (to many memories of Quake related sounds from that SC).

I want to chime in here. I am still using SB Audigy2 that I got back in 2000. I've changed computers three times during this time period. It outlived all of them and still works wonderfully. The way it works, I wouldn't be surprised to still be using it in ten years.My parents have my hand-downs and they're still using my older system that is using an even older SB Live! card. That one is still alive and works just as well.

Worth noting that onboard audio is pretty terrible for me because I have Logitech Z-5

In Personal Computing in the true sense of Personal and not corp-crap or netbooks or whatever, if you're gonna buy a goddamn comp, spend a few hundred bucks to do it right. No one except the media wins with these "budget parts" stories.

So forget the $50 sound card. What can you get with $80?Forget the $50 video card. What can you get with $80?Spend an extra $20 on the fan. Spend an extra $20 on a key cable. Spend an extra $60 on a better HD that has capacity to better meet your growth.Spen

The problem is that if you spend $700 on a video card today, you will get the same Vsync-capped performance you would have gotten out of a $350 card, and six years from now, as you suggest it should last, you would have a brick that can't handle anything remotely modern while the hypothetical other guy would only have a three-year-old $300 card that beats your $700 six-year-old card into the ground.

Six years ago, the Core 2 Duo X6800 and GeForce 7950GX2 were the top-of-the-line parts, costing a grand and $700, respectively. Within two years, both were getting clobbered by parts that cost half as much. Today that $1700 combination wouldn't even be competitive with a $75 A6-3650.

I dumped my Sound Blaster Live! 5.1 for Realtek ALC888 and never looked back. I never heard such clarity until I went with this onboard chipset.

Also, I tried to compare a $99 Razer Barracuda AC-1 with the ALC888, all I could make out is that the back channels get more bass than the front. I'm guessing there's a placebo effect in play here with the little DSP cards...

I dumped my Sound Blaster Live! 5.1 for Realtek ALC888 and never looked back. I never heard such clarity until I went with this onboard chipset.

The SB Live uses two different DACs for front and rear channels, and the consensus is that the DAC for the rear channels sounds significantly better than the front. I had a Live 5.1 and this was the case for me too (though I ditched it for an M-Audio Revolution a while back - great sounding card, woeful drivers).

If anyone is curious, try the kX Project drivers on Windos (*nix you can swap it in alsa).

If only Creative wouldn't have shit in their customers laps when Vista rolled around and actually offered proper drivers for the thing. Also have one of those cards, but I need to use hacked drivers to get any of the features the damn thing is supposed to provide. I mean Creative's drivers don't even support surround sound for this card beyond Windows XP. I swore I'd never buy another Creative card after that, which ended a long tradition of buying Creative sound cards.

I'm not surprised that the integrated chipsets (usually Realtek) get beat by even $50 hardware. They're usually from companies that can't sell a chipset of any type unless it is included with a manufacturer due to not being able to make any provision for performance.

Those companies couldn't make a good chip to save their lives. Or even an acceptable one.

a lot of us use it to measure our own hardware builds and designs. its quite good even though its not a $10k package that those that have deep wallets use.

you can do loopback tests of your analog system (line in to line out, short wire that you buy or build) and it will show your worst case. you can do digital loopback too, if you want. or digital out (to a dac) then analog in to a good a/d box, so you measure outboard dac performance.

These are not audio people and did not have an audio-expert look at their write-up. Why. They got the very well known very-low-cost / not-very-good audio OpAmp NE5532 P wrong as NE55329. No audio-expert would make that mistake. It is not a number, it is an identity that experts immediately recognize.

I have to say that this puts a big question-mark on the whole test for me.

Their analysis of the RightMark audio benchmarks are also complete fail, they do not seem to either understand the Decibel scale / they can't read a graph / they don't understand the limits of human hearing or how Psychoacoustics fit in with the graph.

... And they (original, 16, Live, Audigy 2ZS, etc.) were still better than the onboard audio IMO even with my poor hearing (wear an analog mono hearing aid). I also have a Logitech I used to game a lot so I wanted hardware EAX. I had to dump Audigy 2ZS because of the lack of old PCI slots on the newer motherboards/mobos., so I decided to try onboard RealTek audio. I also don't game these days. Well, onboard's quality and subwoofer's bass were less on my Logitech Z-2300 speakers (2.1 setup and analog).

I bought a nice 520W Corsair PSU has lasted well for years now, only audible if you stick your ear next to it.

With a ASRock Z77 Extreme4 - has THX certified sound out, which I was a little skeptical of but it does seem to eliminate motherboard interference noise

Previously when using a cheap mobo audio, a browser page being scrolled up and down would cause noise, maybe not noticeable with small speakers but very obvious when connected to an amp + large speakers.

OK, maybe this is a technicality but it seems to me that this really belongs in inputdev and not the tag I see. In this case the input-generating machine happens to be a computer and this input is travelling to the sound card. The sound card then sends it to some other device after some processing. At this point the sound card becomes an input device for whatever is receiving the information. It is an acceptor and a generator. And any device that is a generator mentioned here is more likely to be a generat

gives you a better resampler (10 is max. quality at the cost of CPU, default is 3. Don't know if it affects latency, but I'd imagine it would.). PA will only output a single sampling rate, so for example all your MP3s at 44.1kHz will be will be resampled.

There are some good arguments against 96 kHz. Specifically, it is impossible to hear anything above about 22 kHz, and 44 kHz of PCM is sufficient to encode that. If your equipment is not perfectly linear up to 96 kHz, an

Where I am ASUS seem to have the quickest turnaround (1-3 days) but the service centre is local and I've dropped items there in person. That's only from about three items over a few years though.With others it's been well over a week at least and about three to five months in one case for a video card (eVGA, but when the replacement finally came it was a much better card worth about $200 more). If the stuff isn't dealt with locally it might even be a week or two before it's even shipped out. I'd say if I

Just a guess, but I'd say it's because there's stories just like yours for every manufacturer out there*.

Case in point: hard drives. Ask 20 people what hard drives they've had trouble with, and you'll find they pretty much average out as all of the companies having issues. I use Seagate, but you'll find a lot of people here who swear they're the worst drives on the market.

Another example: T-Mobile. I had nothing but trouble with them. They would, for no reason, forgo the automatic draft from my Visa and then shut me off for non-payment. Their customer service was horrible. When I called them at the end of my contract and told them I wanted my service cut as soon as the contract was over, the sales drone threatened me that if I didn't pay the final bill, they'd sue me. I hadn't said anything about it up to then, so this was just out of the blue. (Of course, I knew he was full of shit, and intentionally didn't pay my final bill because of it.)

With all that, T-Mobile has an excellent reputation for customer service and very few people I know have issues with them. Go figure.

The article was about the difference between soundcards and integrated sound, and just happened to use Asus cards for the testing. Your last paragraph was on topic, but the rest of your post wasn't.

* There are a few manufacturers that have earned widespread derision, like PC Chips for its fake cache chips or SCO for judicial douchebaggery. Asus isn't anywhere near that level.

I use Seagate, but you'll find a lot of people here who swear they're the worst drives on the market.

I can remember when that was true. Back in '99, the shop I used to work for would order drives by the case from Ingram Micro. Still sealed from Seagate with the security seals in place. Every drive we'd put in, would be DOA out of the box. We switched to Maxtor, about a year later it started happening with Maxtor, where about 50% of the drives were DOA. I know makers can have serious batch run issues, but the problem with Seagate was beyond stupid.

DG is the PCI version of DGX. I bought a DG, but the headphone amp is not supported on Linux, and there is no hardware volume control, but that's OK because you have 24 bit to play with. It was also branded heavily as a "gamer" card, but I suspect that's just to get the music fans to buy the more expensive cards. Anyway, it sort of worked for me, I got the ST as well. That's more like € 160, but it sounds much better on my 80 ohm headphones, and it's great on my stereo speakers too. I would like to get